The MACS Project: An Approach to Affordance-Inspired Robot Control

Rome, Erich; Paletta, Lucas; Şahi̇n, Erol; Dorffner, Georg; Hertzberg, Joachim; Breithaupt, Ralph; Fritz, Gerald; Irran, Jörg; Kintzler, Florian; Lörken, Christopher; May, Stefan; Uğur, Emre

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-77915-5_12

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Here we use the E-puck robot [8] and mainly its infrared (IR) sensors, indicated in figure 1. We assume the robot has an odometry model that can estimate its position and direction in the environment: p and r. Similarly to the allocentric robot position estimation provided by odometry, O = c, o will denote the estimated position and orientation of an object, and thus reflects the estimation of the state of the external world.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The acquisition of intentionally indexed and object centered affordance gradients: A biomimetic controller and mobile robotics benchmark

Sánchez-Fibla

Duff

Verschure

2011

2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

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We introduce affordance gradients (AGs), continuous sensorimotor structures that allow to predict the consequences of the agent's actions on the state of the environment. AGs allow to generalize among never performed actions and compress all possible consequences of the action state space. AGs also provide a way of estimating the world state after several interactions of the agent with objects. We validate the notion of AGs using benchmarks designed for mobile robotics that we solve using E-puck robot simulations: learn the affordances of several objects, push an object along a predefined trajectory and place an object in at a target position and orientation. We are interested in the neurophysiological basis of affordances and how they can be inserted in a sensorimotor loop with memory structures like the one proposed by the DAC architecture. We show that AGs provide a generalization of the perception-action couplets stored in memory and learned by they adaptive layer of DAC.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The acquisition of intentionally indexed and object centered affordance gradients: A biomimetic controller and mobile robotics benchmark

Sánchez-Fibla

Duff

Verschure

2011

2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

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“…After the publication of J. J. Gibson’s seminal work ( J. J. Gibson, 1979/2015 ) the term has been continuously spreading among a wide variety of academic contexts, from architecture ( Maier et al, 2009 ; Rietveld and Rietveld, 2017 ) to robotics and artificial intelligence ( Effken and Shaw, 1992 ; Duchon et al, 1998 ; Chemero and Turvey, 2007 ; Rome and Dorffner, 2008 ). As an example, a Google Scholar’s search 3 for the term in the decade of 1980–1989 yielded 593 results, while in the current decade (2010–2018) yielded 23500 results.…”

Section: Relevant Developmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The History and Philosophy of Ecological Psychology

2018

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Ecological Psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representational approach pioneered by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson. This theory aims to offer a third way beyond cognitivism and behaviorism for understanding cognition. The theory started with the rejection of the premise of the poverty of the stimulus, the physicalist conception of the stimulus, and the passive character of the perceiver of mainstream theories of perception. On the contrary, the main principles of ecological psychology are the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as unit of analysis, the study of affordances as the objects of perception, combined with an emphasis on perceptual learning and development. In this paper, first, we analyze the philosophical and psychological influences of ecological psychology: pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. Second, we summarize the main concepts of the approach and their historical development following the academic biographies of the proponents. Finally, we highlight the most significant developments of this psychological tradition. We conclude that ecological psychology is one of the most innovative approaches in the psychological field, as it is reflected in its current influence in the contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences, where the notion of affordance and the work of E. J. Gibson and J. J. Gibson is considered as a historical antecedent.

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“…In the field of robotics, situated robotic systems as envisioned early on by Brooks (1991) have been programmed to recognize and make use of affordances (see, e.g., Murphy, 1999). Progress in that field has progressed remarkably, as reported, for example, in Rome et al (2006), related to the European MACS project (“Multi-Sensory Autonomous Cognitive Systems Interacting With Dynamic Environments for Perceiving and Using Affordances”). Roboticists have clearly begun to manipulate specific affordances computationally.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

On the computability of affordances as relations

Maier

2015

AIEDAM

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One of the principal advantages of affordance-based design is that Gibson's theory of affordances is a relational theory, akin to other relational approaches such as relational biology and relational computer science. The relationships between artifacts and their designers and users are of such primary importance that only a theory that is able to deal with those relationships directly appears to be sufficient for describing the wide breadth of problems in engineering design. However, there is no precise definition for what qualifies as a relational theory. In mathematics, we do find something approaching a theory of relations, dating back at least to Charles Peirce's Logic of Relatives around 1870. While rather general, Peirce's ideas on the subject laid the foundation for advances in the 20th century, including the relational model of databases. This paper is a first attempt at applying the mathematics of relations to affordances, with the aim of more precisely characterizing affordances, which heretofore have been difficult to define and, lacking appropriate mathematics, nearly impossible to subject to computation. Meanwhile, the implicit computability of affordances as relations is demonstrated by examples drawn from engineering, physics, computer science, biology, and architecture.

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The MACS Project: An Approach to Affordance-Inspired Robot Control

Cited by 12 publications

References 38 publications

The acquisition of intentionally indexed and object centered affordance gradients: A biomimetic controller and mobile robotics benchmark

The acquisition of intentionally indexed and object centered affordance gradients: A biomimetic controller and mobile robotics benchmark

The History and Philosophy of Ecological Psychology

On the computability of affordances as relations

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